長文読解：祖父のパン屋と「もう来てくれる人」
Read this passage, written by a third-year student in Fukuoka for a school speech contest. The contest rule was: 200 words maximum, and "show, do not tell."
"Last summer my grandfather, who runs a small bakery near Hakata Station, asked me to help him for two weeks. He said, 'We do not need more customers. We need the people who already come to come back.' I did not understand him then. Every morning I stood outside the shop and said good morning to everyone who walked past. I did not write anything down. On the last day, a woman I had never spoken to came in and bought two melonpan. She told my grandfather that she had walked past his shop for eleven years. My grandfather looked at me and smiled."
1. What did the grandfather mean by "We need the people who already come to come back"? Support your answer with specific words from the passage, and name one interpretation the passage does not support.
Read the worked answer
He means repeat, familiar customers matter more than new foot traffic. "More customers" means people who have never stopped; "the people who already come" means people who already pass, look, and know the shop. What he wants is a reason for those people to finally step inside.
Support in the text:
- The woman "had walked past his shop for eleven years" and came in only on the last day - she was already one of "the people who come", just not yet a buyer.
- The writer's method was greeting people by face every morning, which is what turns a passer-by into a familiar face.
An interpretation the passage does not support: "he wanted more money" or "he wanted to be famous." Neither appears; the only evaluative sign is the smile at the end, and it comes after the woman's visit, not after any increase in sales. Answers that only paraphrase "he wanted more customers" miss the contrast the whole sentence is built on.
2. The writer says "I did not write anything down." Why is this detail in the speech, and how does it connect to the contest rule "show, do not tell"?
Read the worked answer
The sentence is a contrast, not a confession. A reader expects a two-week helper to count customers, keep a list, or record sales - data. The writer says she did none of that, and the result still arrives: a woman comes in and buys.
The point is that what she actually did - standing outside and greeting people by face every morning - cannot be entered in a notebook. By removing the notebook, the writer proves the outcome came from familiarity rather than from record-keeping. If she had written "my grandfather taught me that relationships matter more than numbers," that would be telling. Instead she gives a detail (no notes) and an event (the woman) and lets the reader draw the lesson.
So the detail does two jobs: it blocks the obvious wrong explanation (she worked hard at collecting data) and it satisfies the "show, do not tell" rule with one short clause.